38 cessities, the Needs of Our Allies, 'lnd, above all, there was the unspoken ques- tion behind every move: \\ hat would they say? ,V ould they agree with that deal or this decision? It wasn't always easy to guess the way their minds worked-those inscrutable Ininds in Moscow. Benda put his hat and topcoat into a closet, sat down behind the desk, and placed the newspaper, folded length- wise, before hIm. The desk was tidy, ,-he sharpened pencils sticking out of their red container like bayonets, and the uppermost page of the desk calendar showing that day's date. Benda never left the office in the evening without tearing off the uppermost page, thus bringing the day officially to an end. He liked it that way 'VeIl-sharpened pencils and the open desk calendar were a heritage of his file-clerk days. He picked up the newspaper. ./\.n edi- tonal ran down the entire left side of the front page. It was headed, "Man- agerial Incompetence in Our Stee] Industry." The key sentences were printed in double-spaced capital letters, and read, The time has passed \vhen \i'\re could tol- er dte incompetence and L lCk of experience because of a man's Party record. Today the state can no longer afford to tolerate managers unfit and unqualified for their responsibilities, and insufficiently trained to run our major industries. It \vas to those managers that the General Secretary of the Party referred at the last Party Congress \vhen he said, "I'm less con- cerned \vith the number on a man's Party membership card than vvith his production effort. If he cannot deliver the qUotd and beyond the quota, he must be replaced." Benda looked up at the pictures on the wall. They were still slniling at him-but ironically rather than benevo- lently it seemed. There was no need to read the rest of the editorial. Everybody who read the paper would know the rest by heart, and everybod) was under orders to read the paper every day. Practically the same editorial had been published a few months before, when the shoe industry was unable to deliver its quotas, and again, later, when there were sabotige and slowdowns In the coal mines "Failure of the management to utilize reserves of socialist accumula- tion that made more rapid development in both quantity and quality of produc- tion possible. . . Inefficient use of Inan- power and ra material and permit- ting such acts by subordinates.... Faulty judgment concerning measures bound to bolster workers' morale. . ." Stock phrases that surely must have been left standing in type, they were used so LIFE, SCIE,NCE,S BUILDING, BE,RJ(E,LE,Y This building is unequalled for expense and SIze 1 hese doors, constructed to heroic scale, suitable to the huge dominion of Science in the modern enterprise, will close at five. Each young .l merican male will then 1 eturn at sunset to his love. Precautions must be taken: Animals to be dissected must be fastened tight; the heads of mongrels, emptied of their fear, must be deposited in chemicals. V1ay Truth brood sweetly through the darkened nIght upon the Fact a sophomore noted here. ArvIay all the nebulae of Space-Time keep their watch above this temple taxpayers bUIlt. ay al1 the boys who know that life is only stImulus and response lie down to sleep, invulnerable to hUlnan doubt and guilt. ay none of them have bad dreams, none be lonely. -EDITH STUURMAN . frequently. \Vhen the editors were told to attack a specific industry, they merely filled in specIfic names and statIstic . The editorial represented no one's pri- vate opinion; these days, the newspapers expressed neither the writers' nor the editors' opinions but Inerely repeated, interpreted, and confirmed orders from the highest places. The editorial, Benda noted, was signed by the editor-in-chief himself, which Ineant that it had been printed bJ order of the Party's General Secretary. There were two ways of dealing with the issue. Y ou could be fatalistic and let things take their course, hoping for the best, knowing that the worst would hap- pen. Or you could go to pieces, as Kratky had done, trying to figure out every possible contingency, lying awake nigh ts devising ways of escape. The end would be the same; if they had decided to get you, they would get you. You would be sent on "sick leave" froln which you were not likely to return. You would disappear. You would- Benda got up and walked over to the window. .l cross the street, a new bUIld- Ing was gOIng up. Between the third t:j =: == OJ cJ., . and fourth floors, red banners with vio- lent slogans were strung, and down- stairs, by the phone booth near the entrance, was the inevitable Five Year Plan chart and the promise of the Stakhanovites to exceed the Plan's quotas. ... group of workers were stand- ing near the booth, talking idly. They had been at the job for four months; in the old days, it would have been finished sooner, but in the old days the lnasons had been masons and the brick- layers bricklayers. Now man} of the masons and bricklayers had becolne governlnent officials; the new masons and bricklayers had once been lawyers and shopkeepers and salesmen, and they were not too good at their new trade. <....: I should have listened to dina, he thought. She never wanted me to have this career. She WclS happy when I was only a typist and we had the cold-water flat in Karlin. Their chief recreation had been going skiing on Sundays. They couldn't af- ford to go to the Krkonos, but they would take the No 1 tram to the 'Vhite :M ountain, on the outskirts of the city, and have fun getting up and down the soft hills. They would come home and Inake a fire in the tiled stove, and then there would be the smell of smoked sau- ages being cooked, and sweet-sour pickles, and good bread Now Adina had a cook and a butler, who had come with the big villa in Bubenec, and the garden and a gardener, and the car, and none of it meant anything to her. "The car be- longs to the firm," she would say, "and the house isn't ours, either." It had been Dr Jelinek's house, and they didn't use